


Moonlight Sonata

by WildandWhirling



Series: The Abomination Verse [4]
Category: 1789 - バスティーユの恋人たち | 1789: Les Amants de la Bastille - Takarazuka Revue, 1789: Les Amants de la Bastille - Various Composers/Attia & Chouquet
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ronan Lives, Composing, Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, Fluff, Harpsichord Playing, Lazare is a Musical Hipster Pass It On, M/M, Married Life, Muses, Traces of Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-04
Updated: 2020-11-04
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:00:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27376861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WildandWhirling/pseuds/WildandWhirling
Summary: Lazare finds a new hobby in his exile in London. If only it could be a less frustrating one.
Relationships: Ronan Mazurier/Lazare de Peyrol
Series: The Abomination Verse [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/899934
Comments: 3
Kudos: 3





	Moonlight Sonata

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Drabble Prompt "Join Me". 
> 
> I know that the prompt list said "Drabble", but consider: I have no self control. I wasn't going to publish this until the prompt that was submitted in conjunction with this was done, but let's be real, the world is Hell and I have no self control, so here, have married 18th century fluff. (And no, just to emphasize: They are NOT having sex on the harpsichord. This time.)

“It’s past midnight.” Ronan buried his head in Lazare’s neck, wrapping his arms around his middle. “Bed.” 

Lazare pried himself away from the sheet music enough to regard Ronan, eyes moving between his face, his mussed hair, and his nightshirt. “A moment.” Looking out the window of the music room, he realized that it had, without his knowledge, turned dark, the winter bringing with it an early night. The London streets were black, the only light piercing along the darkness coming from the streetlamps that cast a golden glow on the pavement, the lamplighters long having completed their routes for the evening. 

Ronan, undeterred, propped his head on Lazare’s shoulder, narrowing his eyes as he scanned the sheet music that Lazare knew, fully well, he couldn’t read. He shook his head with an air of familiar resignation as he returned to the score. 

He’d had such a clear understanding of it when it’d been in his mind earlier, but then it slowly slipped away from his fingers, and he was reminded of Tantalus in Tartarus, with a perfect bunch of grapes always just that one finger-length away. (Du Puget really _had_ become a poor influence on him, filling his thoughts with Greek fables that would have made his grandfather shudder in his grave.) 

Ten times. He’d tried it ten times. Nothing. He ran until he hit a brick wall, and no matter what he did, all he could do was hit his head against it. 

He tapped his finger on a single ivory key, the note discordant, but no more so than any other. (Well, he had a partial answer: The following note would not be _that_.) 

He’d gotten lost somewhere in the process, he needed to re-orient himself. 

Slowly, he stretched his hands across the instrument, the music floating easily. _This_ was what he wanted, _this_ was what he’d imagined, now, if only-

_Clang_. 

Eleven times. 

Damn the thing. This was so much more frustrating than battle plans or troop drills. Those could be mapped out cleanly. This was all….in the air. Nothing to pin it down, ground it. Just his mind, which was dreadfully unhelpful in any respect at the moment besides saying that this wasn’t accurate. 

Ronan nuzzled into the slight amount of skin not covered with a necktie. “Sounds good.”  
  
If only he knew how _wrong_ he was. This had sounded so well in his head, and then-

Eleven _times_. Eleven.

“Not heard this one before. It new?” 

“In a sense,” Lazare grit out. His husband didn’t need to receive the broad end of his temper. _Ronan_ hadn’t done anything wrong, save for exist. (And Lazare certainly didn’t regret that, though, at the moment, it could be inconvenient.) 

“Who’s it by?”

He chuckled. “You wouldn’t remember.”  
  
“That’s not fair! I remember some of your guys! Like….Bach. I know him! Salieri, Saint-Georges-”  
  
“One can practically _feel_ the Orléanist in his music,” Lazare replied, “Still, I was honored to duel him once.” 

He had been roundly beaten, of course, the young officer against the greatest swordsman in France - Possibly the best that France had ever known, besides the Chevalier d’Eon, but he did like to believe that he gave the man some amount of a challenge, his unfortunate political connections aside. 

“Couperin.” 

Lazare leaned back against Ronan’s body. “Very well. I suppose you have remembered some.”

“Told you!” Ronan squinted at the music. “It’s not like any of the others.”  
  
“If you must know,” Lazare said, knowing that, now that he had opened his mouth, there was no choice but to continue, though he dresses the results, savoring the last moments of freedom “...It’s mine.” 

He waited, feeling suddenly like he was bare, exposed. Which was hardly new in married life, given it required a certain measure of vulnerability, but was still no less terrifying. For the first time, his private project existed beyond his own mind. 

“I thought you didn’t-”  
  
“Normally, I don’t, however...I thought--It was strong in my mind, and so I thought that perhaps I could try...Anyway, it’s very poor work, isn’t it?” 

Ronan shook his head against Lazare’s neck. “I like it. What brought it on?”

Lazare paused, turning to look at him, mouth held halfway between saying _something_ , pausing at Ronan’s face, which dropped in sudden realization. 

Ronan nearly jumped back, freeing Lazare. “Wha- _Me_?”

“I hardly know why you are so surprised,” Lazare replied, “You have a very inspiring presence.”  
  
“Yeah, but-Lazare, this is _good_. You-”

“I resent the implication of _that_ .” He knew very well that Ronan hadn’t thought of it before he spoke. Ronan rarely thought of anything before he spoke, though he had tried admirably in recent days. However, playing the stern schoolmaster had its amusements. Then, Lazare turned serious. “You brought music back into my life, Ronan, for the first time in many years. I-” Approximately five years of having an intimate knowledge of Ronan and still, sometimes, there was that _block_ that came whenever he tried to put any of it into words, his mouth becoming dry the second that he tried. It was embarrassing, to say it out loud, spill his entrails across the room. 

Maybe that was why he’d chosen to write it down anyway. 

He loved Ronan. He knew Ronan knew he loved him. “I love you” had become easier and easier to say as the years went on. As Lazare had, quietly, privately cast off the bulk of emigreé society in the knowledge that they would never accept his (unofficial and, frankly, irreligious) union to a revolutionary. 

But when it came down to what it entailed, what it meant for him to love Ronan, what Ronan had done for him...his tongue stopped. “I’m very grateful to you. I hope you know that.” Decades of duty and devotion, decades of cutting away anything that might distract him from the hope of his eventual, glorious death for the cause of king and country, pressing everything desire, every dream as far down as it could be hidden, and then one filthy peasant with a tendency for wearing the loudest colors known to man came into his life and there was _music_ again in his life. 

And then the music was no longer simply on the page, but in his mind, and he was writing it down, and it was all because of-

He sighed. “You should go to bed, I know that the hour is ungodly and-”  
  
“I’ll stay up with you.” Ronan’s arms wrapped around him again, and Lazare ran a hand along his fingers, taking them in his hands and pressing a kiss to each calloused finger with the reverence that he might have once spared for the King of France himself. He had chosen well, he thought, regardless of what the rest might have thought. (They would not dare speak it aloud, the scandal impossible to name but impossible to ignore.) “Come on, you know it isn’t the same without you, anyway.” He released Lazare from the embrace, freeing him to play unobstructed, but stood closely by.

It remained unmentioned that, after all this time, after all they had seen, neither felt safe sleeping without the other, anyway. Too many ghosts hung over their bed otherwise, and, in a foreign country where people spoke a foreign tongue and treated them as objects of pity at best, parasites at worst, the closest thing that he had to a home was in Ronan Mazurier’s arms. 

Lazare readied himself to begin again, slowly, hesitantly poising his hands across the keys. The first chord rang out, then two, three, four, exactly as he’d planned, until--

Twelve times. 

Ronan kissed the top of his head, his hand fell down and--

_Perfection_. 

It was exactly what needed to go there, the one that his mind hadn’t been able to properly capture. He looked up at Ronan in absolute awe, and Ronan jerked his head towards the sheet music. “You going to keep playing or-?” 

Lazare quickly jotted down the chord with the pen that he kept nearby, the note almost a blot of ink on the page in his rush to get it down before it left his memory. 

It was as if the composition as a whole was a piece of rope, tied with a series of knots and, with the undoing of that last, final not, the entire thing unravelled beautifully, each note that came after building upon the last, the strains he’d imagined being bound together as if by threads of gold. If it wasn’t the piece that he imagined, it was better, flowing from his head to the keys and-

  
“Whoa,” Ronan said. “You did it.”  
  
He’d _done_ it. 

Ronan kissed his mouth slowly, tenderly, rough hands stroking along Lazare’s hair, pulling him in before murmuring against his lips, “I’m so proud of you.” 

It was ridiculous how, after all this time, just the knowledge that Ronan was proud of him was enough to make it all worth it. That, for once in his life, someone looked at something he’d done and _acknowledged_ it. His past self would have scoffed to know that he put so much worth on the esteem of a man so far below him in rank, but the Lazare of 1794 was too pleased to care. He had made his husband proud of him. Had he been awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Saint Louis, he couldn’t have been more pleased. 

“The harpsichord--is out--of fashion,” he said, in-between kisses. He knew it was better to not make too much of anything, because a victory was rarely a victory, even though he could feel his own chest swelling, his head light with the knowledge that he’d done it. “The pianoforte is all that anyone wishes to--talk about. Very little music is being--made for the harpsichord.” 

The piano did not have, in Lazare’s opinion, the elegance or structure of the harpsichord, all soft notes blurry together. There was no definition to it, no character. Then again, they did live in times where elegance and structure were becoming a thing of the past.

“Then you’ll bring it back in,” Ronan said. “Lazare de Peyrol’s first.” 

Lazare gave a wan smile in response. “I hardly possess enough skill for it.”

Ronan’s expression turned mischievous, kissing his cheek before striding away in the general direction of their bedroom. “Let me be the judge of that.” 

Lazare contemplated the finished sheet music, the wet ink still drying on it, then contemplated the fall of Ronan’s footsteps on the mahogany floors, making his decision in an instant, the paper all but flying out of his hands as he ran to catch up with his husband.

**Author's Note:**

> By 1794, the harpsichord was very much on its way out, generally having been replaced by the piano. Albert G. Hess wrote an article on the topic, "The Transition from Harpsichord to Piano" that deals with it. Most interesting for 1789 purposes is that it does deal, specifically, with the confiscation records of noble households which, as noted by Hess, often contained harpsichords and pianos, though that was most likely because the nobles kept the harpsichords hanging around, collecting dust because they saw no reason to sell them. Personally, I have a hard time seeing Lazare being willing to make the transition, so here he is, in 1794, in London, still hanging onto his harpsichord.


End file.
